Eating With Ed - Week 2, Chattanooga

If you watch a coach give enough of these scheduled press conferences, you start to pick up their tendencies. Coach O always likes to praise members of the coaching staff for the work they did for the team in the past game. This week, Coach O starts off heaping praise on Tommy Moffitt for the preseason conditioning and also praises O-Line coach Jeff Grimes for getting the young line to work well together. After mentioning the 17 freshmen who played and repeating a few game stats, O dives into the negatives. Areas of concern after the game are red zone efficiency, eliminating penalties, and improving the kickoffs. Specifically, O says the competition for kickoff kicker is back open. “We want our kickoffs into the end zone. Our kickoffs were not what they are supposed to be.” Also, the staff was not pleased with how the kickoff coverage and lane assignments turned out, so there will be changes there. A few notes from the Chattanooga game notes and it’s on to questions.

O was really pleased with the O-Line, even with the expected mistakes that come with playing a few young guys. The gameplan wasn’t meant to use Guice so much, and it’s a concern they’ll monitor going forward. “I don't think that you're going to see Derrius carrying the ball over 25 times or 30 times in a game every game. We don't want to wear him out.” Not using Donte Jackson on punt returns was a gametime decision, with Coach O wanting a more experienced back for the first game. Still no word on if Arden Key is cleared for this week’s game, and he was in a gold no contact jersey at today’s practice, though it looks like he’s close to ready.

The idea behind using fullbacks like JD Moore and Foster Moreau at TE spots is an idea by Matt Canada to create mismatches. Etling’s performance was praised multiple times, but Coach O still seems concerned about what’s going to happen the first time he get’s hit and has to shake it off and keep playing. “The competition, as we grow, is going to get stiffer. I think the thing with Danny is we all have confidence in him. But everybody is waiting to see him win the big game. And let me say this correctly: He'll never win the big game by himself. We'll do it as a team.”

Lots of talk about the “Cheetah” defensive package, which is designed to get LSU’s fastest defenders on the field in pass rush situations. It’s partially designed to make up for the fact that there is no player on the team right now who can duplicate Lewis Neal’s role from last season.

“You know, last year we had Lewis Neal that could play four-technique and he could play six-technique. So we didn't have to sub when we went to three and four and over. Now we don't have a guy that can do that; that is strong enough to play inside and is quick enough to play the quarterback.

So we have to make a substitution. Now we have more outside linebackers so we can do that. I think Dave has done a good job of using our personnel. We need to be careful what we do on third down because a lot of times you want to put all fast guys in there, and we've done that and sometimes you move a defensive end to defensive tackle and he gets stymied by a big guard because he's just not used to playing in there.

So we are very careful what we do. But certain situations, we are going to put four fast guys in there and let them go.”

Frank Herron and Dee Anderson are out with injury and are doubtful for the game this week. Sci Martin is expected to return to practice this week. Other players who were out for suspension can work their way back to the field this week, but Coach O would not go into detail about it.

Transcript

GAME NOTES

LSU [PDF]

Chattanooga [PDF]

DEPTH CHART

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